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Nobel winner Sir John Gurdon was labelled a failure at school. It would never happen now — but it should, says former teacher Catherine Nixey

One of the world’s most successful failures thinks for a moment. Sir John
Gurdon — frog cloner, Nobel prizewinner, terrible-report receiver — is
considering what he thought of that school report: the report that became
infamous last month when he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine;
the report that said it had been a “disastrous half” and his hopes for a
scientific career were “ridiculous”.

“I regard it,” he says, “as amusing.”

It is not a reply you would hear today. Not because pupils never complete
disastrous half-terms (as a former teacher, I can confirm that, alas, they
do) but